Imam, Omar
Syrian, b. 1979
BiographyAs a political refugee, Omar Imam uses irony and absurdism to address the violent events taking place in Syria and to also subvert inaccurate representations of Syrian Refugees. For his photographic series Live, Love, Refugee (2015), he collaborated with displaced people living in Lebanese refugee camps to reenact their heartrending stories and recreate their nightmares and dreams of escape, terror, and love. The resulting staged photographs are surreal and reveal both remarkable resilience and the darkness of trauma. Omar Imam won the Tim Hetherington Visionary Award in 2017 for a project titled Syrialism and was featured in the 2018 Museum of Contemporary Photography exhibition, Stateless: Views of Global Migration.